Wednesday, January 26, 2011

digital initiating

Jeff Leonard is Lewis & Clark's sole instructor in Electronic Music. Last week, Watzek Digital Services Coordinator Jeremy McWilliams and I met him in his studio, a tiny dark triangular room with three iMacs in it that is often packed with students because of the popularity of his courses. Jeff told us about his student projects and his ambitions to archive the best of them and we bounced around some ideas for creating a site that would do that.

He observed that students in the last few years are much more aware of copyright law and the whole concept of appropriating content. They know about creative commons licensing and some even know who Lawrence Lessig is. He showed us this student project, which is somewhat emblematic of that trend.

Yesterday Jeremy and Visual Resources Coordinator Stephanie Beene and I had lunch with Garrick Imatani, our Foundations professor in the Art department. Garrick's ideas for digital projects include a site that would support digital means of delivering art work, kind of like this one; pairing up a group of students with a parallel group in another part of the world to do an art project using a division of labor that would mirror and perhaps invert the one we see in current global trade; and building a website that would act as an exchange, archive, and curriculum generator for the emerging genre of Social Practice art.

These are just a few of the ideas that have been bubbling up following our digital scholarship workshop. Indeed, the most rewarding part of doing library digital initiatives is the opportunity to tap into the creative intellectual energy that abounds within a campus environment. We look forward to some of these initial meetings leading to future collaborative digital projects with the library.